Biography

Early life, educational background, and family

Jean François Lyotard was born on August 10, 1924 in Vincennes, France to Jean-Pierre Lyotard, a sales representative, and Madeleine Cavalli. He went to primary school at the Paris Lycée Buffon and Louis-le-Grand. As a child, Lyotard had many aspirations: to be an artist, a historian, a Dominican friar, and a writer. He later gave up the dream of becoming a writer when he finished writing an unsuccessful fictional novel at the age of 15.[8] Ultimately, Lyotard describes the realization that he would not become any of these occupations as "fate" in his intellectual biography called Peregrinations,[8] published in 1988.

He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in the late 1940s. His 1947 DES thesis[a], Indifference as an Ethical Concept (L'indifférence comme notion éthique), analyzed forms of indifference and detachment in Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and Epicureanism.[2][9] In 1950, Lyotard took up a position teaching philosophy in Constantine in French Algeria but returned to mainland France in 1952 to teach at the Prytanée military academy in La Flèche, where he wrote a short work on Phenomenology, published in 1954.[10] Lyotard moved to Paris in 1959 to teach at the Sorbonne: introductory lectures from this time (1964) have been posthumously published under the title Why Philosophize?. Having moved to teach at the new campus of Nanterre in 1966, Lyotard participated in the events following March 22 and the tumult of May 1968. In 1971, Lyotard earned a State doctorate with his dissertation Discours, figure under Mikel Dufrenne—the work was published the same year.[11] Lyotard joined the Philosophy department of the experimental University at Vincennes, later Paris 8, together with Gilles Deleuze, in the academic year 1970-71; it remained his academic home in France until 1987.[12] He married his first wife, Andrée May, in 1948 with whom he had two children, Corinne and Laurence, and later married for a second time in 1993 to Dolores Djidzek, the mother of his son David (born in 1986).[13]

Political life

In 1954, Lyotard became a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie ("Socialism or Barbarism"), a French political organisation formed in 1948 around the inadequacy of the Trotskyist analysis to explain the new forms of domination in the Soviet Union. Socialisme ou Barbarie had an objective to conduct a critique of Marxism from within during the Algerian war of liberation. His writings in this period are mostly concerned with ultra-left politics, with a focus on the Algerian situation—which he witnessed first-hand while teaching philosophy in Constantine.[14] He wrote optimistic essays of hope and encouragement to the Algerians, which were reproduced in Political Writings.[15] Lyotard hoped to encourage an Algerian fight for independence from France, and a social revolution. Following disputes with Cornelius Castoriadis in 1964, Lyotard left Socialisme ou Barbarie for the newly formed splinter groupPouvoir Ouvrier ("Worker Power"), from which he resigned in turn in 1966.[16] Although Lyotard played an active part in the May 1968 uprisings, he distanced himself from revolutionary Marxism with his 1974 book Libidinal Economy.[17] He distanced himself from Marxism because he felt that Marxism had a rigid structuralist approach and they were imposing 'systematization of desires' through strong emphasis on industrial production as the ground culture.[18]

Work

Lyotard's work is characterised by a persistent opposition to universals, meta-narratives, and generality. He is fiercely critical of many of the 'universalist' claims of the Enlightenment, and several of his works serve to undermine the fundamental principles that generate these broad claims.

In his writings of the early 1970s, he rejects what he regards as theological underpinnings of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud: "In Freud, it is judaical, critical sombre (forgetful of the political); in Marx it is catholic. Hegelian, reconciliatory (...) in the one and in the other the relationship of the economic with meaning is blocked in the category of representation (...) Here a politics, there a therapeutics, in both cases a laical theology, on top of the arbitrariness and the roaming of forces".[19] Consequently, he rejected Theodor W. Adorno's negative dialectics because he viewed them as seeking a "therapeutic resolution in the framework of a religion, here the religion of history."[20] In Lyotard's "libidinal economics" he aimed at "discovering and describing different social modes of investment of libidinal intensities".[21]

The Postmodern Condition

Lyotard is a skeptic for modern cultural thought. According to his 1979 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the impact of the postmodern condition was to provoke skepticism about universalizing theories. Lyotard argues that we have outgrown our needs for metanarratives (French: grand narratives) due to the advancement of techniques and technologies since World War II. He argues against the possibility of justifying the narratives that bring together disciplines and social practices, such as science and culture; "the narratives we tell to justify a single set of laws and stakes are inherently unjust."[22] A loss of faith in metanarratives has an effect on how we view science, art, and literature. Little narratives have now become the appropriate way for explaining social transformations and political problems. Lyotard argues that this is the driving force behind postmodern science. As metanarratives fade, science suffers a loss of faith in its search for truth, and therefore must find other ways of legitimating its efforts. Connected to this scientific legitimacy is the growing dominance for information machines. Lyotard argues that one day, in order for knowledge to be considered useful, it will have to be converted into computerized data. Years later, this led him into writing his book The Inhuman, published in 1988, in which he illustrates a world where technology has taken over.[23]

In Lyotard's works, the term 'language games', sometimes also called 'phrase regimens', denotes the multiplicity of communities of meaning, the innumerable and incommensurable separate systems in which meanings are produced and rules for their circulation are created.[28] This involves, for example, an incredulity towards the metanarrative of human emancipation. That is, the story of how the human race has set itself free that brings together the language game of science, the language game of human historical conflicts and the language game of human qualities into the overall justification of the steady development of the human race in terms of wealth and moral well-being. According to this metanarrative, the justification of science is related to wealth and education. The development of history is seen as a steady progress towards civilization or moral well-being. The language game of human passions, qualities and faults (c.f. character flaws (narratives)), is seen as steadily shifting in favor of our qualities and away from our faults as science and historical developments help us to conquer our faults in favor of our qualities. The point is that any event ought to be able to be understood in terms of the justifications of this metanarrative; anything that happens can be understood and judged according to the discourse of human emancipation. For example, for any new social, political or scientific revolution we could ask the question, "Is this revolution a step towards the greater well-being of the mass of human beings?" It should always be possible to answer this question in terms of the rules of justification of the metanarrative of human emancipation.[29]

This becomes more crucial in Au juste: Conversations (Just Gaming) (1979) and Le Différend (The Differend) (1983), which develop a postmodern theory of justice. It might appear that the atomisation of human beings implied by the notion of the micronarrative and the language game suggests a collapse of ethics. It has often been thought that universality is a condition for something to be a properly ethical statement: 'thou shalt not steal' is an ethical statement in a way that 'thou shalt not steal from Margaret' is not. The latter is too particular to be an ethical statement (what's so special about Margaret?); it is only ethical if it rests on a universal statement ('thou shalt not steal from anyone'). But universals are impermissible in a world that has lost faith in metanarratives, and so it would seem that ethics is impossible. Justice and injustice can only be terms within language games, and the universality of ethics is out of the window. Lyotard argues that notions of justice and injustice do in fact remain in postmodernism. The new definition of injustice is indeed to use the language rules from one 'phrase regimen' and apply them to another. Ethical behaviour is about remaining alert precisely to the threat of this injustice, about paying attention to things in their particularity and not enclosing them within abstract conceptuality. One must bear witness to the 'differend.' In a differend, there is a conflict between two parties that cannot be solved in a just manner. However, the act of being able to bridge the two and understand the claims of both parties, is the first step towards finding a solution.

"I would like to call a differend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. If the addressor, the addressee, and the sense of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no damages. A case of differend between two parties takes place when the regulation of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom."[30]

In more than one book, Lyotard promoted what he called paganism and contrasted it with both the rejection of the pagan gods in Book II of Plato's The Republic and the monotheism of Judaism. Lyotard argued that the pagan gods, unlike Platonic philosophy and monotheism, never claimed to have universal truth, but instead were better than humans because they were better at deceit and metamorphosis. Lyotard's paganism was also feminist because he argued that women, like paganism, are antirational and antiphilosophical.[31]

The Differend

In The Differend, based on Immanuel Kant's views on the separation of Understanding, Judgment, and Reason, Lyotard identifies the moment in which language fails as the differend, and explains it as follows: "...the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be… the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication, learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom)".[32] Lyotard undermines the common view that the meanings of phrases can be determined by what they refer to (the referent). The meaning of a phrase—an event (something happens)--cannot be fixed by appealing to reality (what actually happened). Lyotard develops this view of language by defining "reality" in an original way, as a complex of possible senses attached to a referent through a name. The correct sense of a phrase cannot be determined by a reference to reality, since the referent itself does not fix sense, and reality itself is defined as the complex of competing senses attached to a referent. Therefore, the phrase event remains indeterminate.

Lyotard uses the example of Auschwitz and the revisionist historian Faurisson’s demands for proof of the Holocaust to show how the differend operates as a double bind (a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions). Faurisson will only accept proof of the existence of gas chambers from eyewitnesses who were themselves victims of the gas chambers. However, any such eyewitnesses are dead and are not able to testify. Either there were no gas chambers, in which case there would be no eyewitnesses to produce evidence, or there were gas chambers, in which case there would still be no eyewitnesses to produce evidence, because they would be dead. Since Faurisson will accept no evidence for the existence of gas chambers, except the testimony of actual victims, he will conclude from both possibilities (gas chambers existed and gas chambers did not exist) that gas chambers did not exist. This presents a double bind. There are two alternatives, either there were gas chambers or there were not, which lead to the same conclusion: there were no gas chambers (and no final solution).[33] The case is a differend because the harm done to the victims cannot be presented in the standard of judgement upheld by Faurisson.

He developed these themes in particular by discussing the sublime. The "sublime" is a term in aesthetics whose fortunes revived under postmodernism after a century or more of neglect. It refers to the experience of pleasurable anxiety that we experience when confronting wild and threatening sights like, for example, a massive craggy mountain, black against the sky, looming terrifyingly in our vision. A sublime is the conjunction of two opposed feelings, which makes it harder for us to see the injustice of it, or a solution to it.

Lyotard found particularly interesting the explanation of the sublime offered by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (sometimes Critique of the Power of Judgment). In this book, Kant explains this mixture of anxiety and pleasure in the following terms: there are two kinds of 'sublime' experience. In the 'mathematically' sublime, an object strikes the mind in such a way that we find ourselves unable to take it in as a whole. More precisely, we experience a clash between our reason (which tells us that all objects are finite) and the imagination (the aspect of the mind that organizes what we see, and which sees an object incalculably larger than ourselves, and feels infinite). In the 'dynamically' sublime, the mind recoils at an object so immeasurably more powerful than we, whose weight, force, scale could crush us without the remotest hope of our being able to resist it. (Kant stresses that if we are in actual danger, our feeling of anxiety is very different from that of a sublime feeling. The sublime is an aesthetic experience, not a practical feeling of personal danger.) This explains the feeling of anxiety.

What is deeply unsettling about the mathematically sublime is that the mental faculties that present visual perceptions to the mind are inadequate to the concept corresponding to it; in other words, what we are able to make ourselves see cannot fully match up to what we know is there. We know it's a mountain but we cannot take the whole thing into our perception. Our sensibility is incapable of coping with such sights, but our reason can assert the finitude of the presentation. With the dynamically sublime, our sense of physical danger should prompt an awareness that we are not just physical material beings, but moral and (in Kant's terms) noumenal beings as well. The body may be dwarfed by its power but our reason need not be. This explains, in both cases, why the sublime is an experience of pleasure as well as pain.

Lyotard is fascinated by this admission, from one of the philosophical architects of the Enlightenment, that the mind cannot always organise the world rationally. Some objects are simply incapable of being brought neatly under concepts. For Lyotard, in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, but drawing on his argument in The Differend, this is a good thing. Such generalities as 'concepts' fail to pay proper attention to the particularity of things. What happens in the sublime is a crisis where we realise the inadequacy of the imagination and reason to each other. What we are witnessing, says Lyotard, is actually the differend; the straining of the mind at the edges of itself and at the edges of its conceptuality.

Libidinal Economy

In one of Lyotard's most famous books, Libidinal Economy he offers a critique of Marx’s "false consciousness" and claims that the 19th century working class enjoyed being a part of the industrialization process. Lyotard claims that this is due to libidinal energy. The term "libidinal" coming from the term libido which is used to refer to the psychoanalytical desires of our deeper consciousness. Lyotard’s writings in Libidinal Economy is an achievement in our attempts to live with the rejection of all religious and moral principles through an undermining of the structures associated with it.[35] Structures conceal libidinal intensities while intense feelings and desires force us away from set structures. However, there also can be no intensities or desires without structures, because there would be no dream of escaping the repressive structures if they do not exist. "Libidinal energy comes from this disruptive intervention of external events within structures that seek order and self-containment."[22] This was the first of Lyotard's writings that had really criticized a Marxist view. It achieved great success, but was also the last of Lyotard's writings on this particular topic where he really went against the views of Karl Marx.

Les Immatériaux

"Mainmise"

Lyotard was impressed by the importance of childhood in human life,[37] which he saw as providing the opportunity of creativity, as opposed to the settled hubris of maturity.[38] In "Mainmise"[39] however, he also explored the hold of childhood experience on the individual through the (Roman) concept of the Mancipium, or authoritative right of possession.[38] Because parental influences affect the new-born before it has the linguistic skill even to articulate – let alone oppose – them, Lyotard considered that "We are born from others but also to others, given over defenceless to them. Subject to their mancipium."[40]

Later life and death

Some of the latest works that Lyotard had been working on were both writings about a French writer, activist, and politician, André Malraux. One of them being a biography, Signed, Malraux. Lyotard was interested in the aesthetic views of society that Malraux shared. Lyotard's other book was named The Confession of Augustine and was a study in the phenomenology of time. This work-in-progress was published posthumously in the same year of Lyotard's death.

Lyotard repeatedly returned to the notion of the Postmodern in essays gathered in English as The Postmodern Explained to Children, Toward the Postmodern, and Postmodern Fables. In 1998, while preparing for a conference on postmodernism and media theory, he died unexpectedly from a case of leukemia that had advanced rapidly. He is buried in Division 6 of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.[41]

Criticism

There are three major criticisms of Lyotard's work. Each coincides with a school of thought. Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy have written deconstructions of Lyotard's work (Derrida 1992; Nancy 1985).[42] They focus on Lyotard's postmodern work and on The Differend in particular. A differend depends upon a distinction drawn between groups that itself depends upon the heterogeneity of language games and genres of discourse. Why should these differences be privileged over an endless division and reconstruction of groups? In concentrating on specific differences, Lyotard's thought becomes overly dependent on differences; between categories that are given as fixed and well defined. From the point of view of deconstruction, Lyotard's philosophy gives too much credit to illegitimate categories and groups. Underlying any different there is a multiplicity of further differences; some of these will involve crossing the first divide, others will question the integrity of the groups that were originally separated.[43]

Manfred Frank (1988) has put the Frankfurt School criticism best. It attacks Lyotard's search for division over consensus on the grounds that it involves a philosophical mistake with serious political and social repercussions. Lyotard has failed to notice that an underlying condition for consensus is also a condition for the successful communication of his own thought. It is a performative contradiction to give an account that appeals to our reason on behalf of a difference that is supposed to elude it. So, in putting forward a false argument against a rational consensus, Lyotard plays into the hands of the irrational forces that often give rise to injustice and differ ends. Worse, he is then only in a position to testify to that injustice, rather than put forward a just and rational resolution.[43]

From a Nietzschean and Deleuzian point of view (James Williams 2000), Lyotard's postmodern philosophy took a turn toward a destructive modern nihilism that his early work avoids. The different and the sublime are negative terms that introduce a severe pessimism at the core of Lyotard's philosophy. Both terms draw lines that cannot be crossed and yet they mark the threshold of that which is most valuable for the philosophy, that which is to be testified to and its proper concern. It is not possible repetitively to lend an ear to the sublime without falling into despair due to its fleeting nature. Whenever we try to understand or even memorize: the activity of testimony through the sublime, it can only be as something that has now dissipated and that we cannot capture.[43]

Charles J. Stivale, of Wayne State University, wrote a critique of Lyotard's The Differend for The French Review, in 1990. In it, he states: "Jean-François Lyotard's is a dense work of philosophical, political and ethical reflection aimed at a specialized audience versed in current debates in logic, pragmatics and post-structuralism. Even George Van Den Abbeele's excellent translation, complete with a glossary of French terms not available in the original text (Paris: Minuit, 1983), does not, indeed cannot, alleviate the often terse prose with which Lyotard develops his reasoning. With this said, I must also observe that this work is of vital importance in a period when revisionism of all stripes attempts to rewrite, and often simply deny, the occurrence of historical and cultural events, i.e. in attempting to reconstruct 'reality" in the convenient names of "truth" and "common sense" … This overview must leave unexplored the broad philosophical bases from which Lyotard draws support, as well as important questions that he raises regarding history, justice and critical judgement. I can conclude only by suggesting that this work, despite the formidable difficulties inherent to its carefully articulated arguments, offers readers a rich formulation of precise questions for and about the current period of critical transition and re-opening in philosophy, ethics and aesthetics."[44]

Influence

The collective tribute to Lyotard following his death was organized by the Collège International de Philosophie, and chaired by Dolores Lyotard and Jean-Claude Milner, the College's director at that time. The proceedings were published by PUF in 2001 under the general title Jean-François Lyotard, l'exercice du différend.[45]

Camera Obscura is a journal of feminism, culture, and media studies published by Duke University Press. Published three times per year, the journal focuses on "the conjunctions of gender, race, class, and sexuality with audiovisual culture; new histories and theories of film, television, video, and digital media; and politically engaged approaches to a range of media practices." It was founded in 1976 by four graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Janet Bergstrom, Sandy Flitterman, Elisabeth Lyon, and Constance Penley. The four co-founders had met while working on the magazine Women and Film.In its early years, the journal centered on film as its object of analysis, and strove to use "new approaches in feminist, cultural, and critical theory to rethink cinema, as well as, notably, using cinema to rethink feminism and critical theory." In 1995, the journal's subtitle was changed from "A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory" to "Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies" to reflect that its interests had developed beyond semiotic and psychoanalytic theories to include approaches such as industrial and historical analyses, genre and star studies, ethnographic and reception models, analyses of race and ethnicity, postcolonial theory and critiques of empire, and queer and trans studies.Camera Obscura has included articles by such contributors as Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, Raymond Bellour, Christian Metz, Jean-François Lyotard, Marguerite Duras, Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, Laura Mulvey, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Constance Penley, and E. Ann Kaplan.

Claire Sherman (born 1981, Oberlin, Ohio) is an American painter currently living and working in New York City. Her work is in the collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, Kansas), the Margulies Collection (Miami), and other noteworthy public and private collections. She has had solo exhibitions in New York's DC Moore Gallery and DCKT Contemporary, Amsterdam's Galerie Hof & Huyser, London's Houldsworth Gallery, and Chicago's Kavi Gupta Gallery.Sherman's main body of work consists of landscapes painted with oil on canvas. Their subject matter, more specifically described as icy glaciers, ominous islands, rocky terrain, and foliage, is in line with philosophical discourse on the sublime. Sherman is influenced by the writings of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-François Lyotard who discussed the sublime and the beauty of the natural world.

Colonialism and Neocolonialism by Jean-Paul Sartre (first published in French in 1964) is a controversial and influential critique of French policies in Algeria. It argues for French disengagement from its former Overseas Empire and controversially defending the rights of violent resistance by groups such as the Algerian FLN in order to achieve this.

Its text includes Sartre's preface to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. The book influenced later writings by Albert Memmi, and Jean-François Lyotard.

Geoffrey Bennington (born 1956) is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University in Georgia, United States, and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, as well as a member of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. He is a literary critic and philosopher, best known as an expert on deconstruction and the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Bennington has translated many of Derrida's works into English.

Libidinal Economy (French: Économie Libidinale) is a 1974 book by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. The work has been compared to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972), which, like it, is seen as a key text in the micropolitics of desire. Libidinal Economy has been criticized on numerous grounds, including lack of a moral or political orientation.

Mitra Tabrizian is a British-Iranian photographer and film director. She is also a professor of photography at the University of Westminster, London.

Tabrizian published her first monograph, Correct Distance, in 1990. Her photo-book Beyond the Limits (2004), is a critique of corporate culture and is inspired by the works of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. Her films include Journey of No Return (1993), The Third Woman (1991), and The Predator (2004).

Tabrizian has exhibited her work at the Tate, Modern Art Oxford, Gallery Lelong, New York, the Architectural Association, London, and numerous film festivals. In January 2018, she exhibited at London Art Fair with Arte Globale.

The publishing house Passagen Verlag was founded in 1985 in Vienna by Peter Engelmann. The primary intention of the publisher was the translation of Jacques Derrida's work into German. Around the author Derrida, Peter Engelmann developed a program, which gathers relevant authors of all disciplines, who identified themselves with the program deconstruction ("Dekonstruktivismus") and "postmodernism" (Postmoderne). Peter Engelmann was honoured by the French State in February 2004 with the title "Commandeur dans l´ordre des Arts et des Lettres" for his work as publisher.

Pierre Guillaume (born 22 December 1940) is a French political activist and publisher. He was the founder of the Paris book shop La Vieille Taupe in 1965 and later the Holocaust denying publishing house of the same name. A former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, he moved to Pouvoir Ouvrier with Jean-François Lyotard and Pierre Souyri.

Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Enlightenment. Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like difference, repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert "grand narratives", univocity of being, and epistemic certainty. Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships, personalization, and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there are objective moral values.Jean-François Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition, writing "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards meta narratives...." where what he means by metanarrative is something like a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Postmodernists reject metanarratives because they reject the concept of truth that metanarratives presuppose. Postmodernist philosophers in general argue that truth is always contingent on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal and that truth is always partial and "at issue" rather than being complete and certain.Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about simple binary oppositions characteristic of structuralism, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly distinguishing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, good from bad, and presence from absence. But, for the same reasons, postmodern philosophy should often be particularly skeptical about the complex spectral characteristics of things, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher again cleanly distinguishing concepts, for a concept must be understood in the context of its opposite, such as existence and nothingness, normality and abnormality, speech and writing, and the like.Postmodern philosophy also has strong relations with the substantial literature of critical theory.

Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism. The term has been more generally applied to the historical era following modernity and the tendencies of this era.

While encompassing a wide variety of approaches, postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection of the meta-narratives and ideologies of modernism, often calling into question various assumptions of Enlightenment rationality. Consequently, common targets of postmodern critique include universalist notions of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress. Postmodern thinkers frequently call attention to the contingent or socially-conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence.

Postmodern critical approaches gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy of science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature and music. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson.

Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, and include assertions that postmodernism promotes obscurantism, and is meaningless, adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.

Postmodern international relations is an approach that has been part of international relations scholarship since the 1980s. Although there are various strands of thinking, a key element to postmodernist theories is a distrust of any account of human life which claims to have direct access to the truth. Postmodern international relations theory critiques theories like Marxism that provide an overarching metanarrative to history. Key postmodern thinkers include Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.A criticism made of postmodern approaches to international relations is that they place too much emphasis on theoretical notions and are generally not concerned with the empirical evidence.

Robert Harvey (born Robert James Harvey in Oakland, California in 1951) is a literary scholar, philosopher, and academic. He is Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he teaches aesthetics, comparative literature, philosophy, and theory. His research and publications are primarily concerned with the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourses.

He has written on Samuel Beckett, Primo Levi, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Marcel Duchamp and Michel Deguy and has translated Lyotard, Deguy, Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, and other French thinkers. His most recent books are Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics (Continuum, 2010) and Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017). Harvey is one of several scholars who prepared the Pléiade edition of the complete works of Marguerite Duras (volumes I and II were published in October 2011 and volumes III and IV in May 2014).

Harvey served as chair of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook until 2017, when these disciplines were summarily eliminated by "strategic" decision. Prior to that, he had chaired the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory from 2002 until 2015, and was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, from 2001 until 2007.

Harvey completed his B.A in French Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, and an M.A. at San Francisco State University in 1975. He returned to academia in 1980 and completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley on the ethical thought of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1988. During that period he also studied at the École Normale Supérieure and the Université de Paris VII (Jussieu). Harvey obtained an Habilitation à diriger des recherches (H.D.R.) degree in 2001 defending of a second thesis entitled "Les Styles de l'éthique".

The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant's Philosophy is a 2000 book edited by Andrea Rehberg and Rachel Ellen Jones.

It is a collection of essays offering an account of Kantian thought from the Continental perspective as developed by such thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard. The book has been reviewed by Frank Schalow and Kimberly Hutchings.

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (French: La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir) is a 1979 book by Jean-François Lyotard, in which Lyotard analyzes the notion of knowledge in postmodern society as the end of 'grand narratives' or metanarratives, which he considers a quintessential feature of modernity. Lyotard introduced the term 'postmodernism', which was previously only used by art critics, into philosophy and social sciences, with the following observation: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives". Originally written as a report on the influence of technology in exact sciences, commissioned by the Conseil des universités du Québec, The Postmodern Condition was influential. Lyotard later admitted that he had a "less than limited" knowledge of the science he was to write about, deeming The Postmodern Condition his worst book.

This page is based on a Wikipedia article written by authors
(here).
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.